It is very important to have a committed team in order to be able to implement ERP with some modicum of success. If all the people working in your company are aligned towards making your ERP implementation successful, then they will put in efforts likewise. This will help you to focus on other areas that are important in helping your company become successful in the long run. Consider another situation. Your middle management senses that it can create problems between the team that is implementing the EPR and the one that takes all the executive decisions. In that case, the environment can actually become rather poisonous.
In such a situation you will find that you are spending a lot of time – much more than you intended to in the first place – in review meetings where you end up defending the decisions that you have taken. This is why it is important to have some leadership commitment and the best thing about this is that it does not take a lot of effort. As an initiative, ERP is strategically important. This means that when you decided to implement it, there must have been a certain level of commitment and interest in the same.
You also need to take into consideration the fact that ERP is known to have medium to high levels of risk. Its benefits (read about the benefits of SAP Business One and Sage 300 ERP) are also hard to quantify in the strictest sense of the term. In such a case, as an organization, your aim should be to foster the support you enjoyed originally and keep it growing. It could so happen that nothing remarkable may happen in months. Patience is the key over here. When one looks at design sessions it becomes rather clear that ERP implementation will need a significant amount of change. There are times when one hears that implementing ERP could have a destructive effect on business.
This happens mostly in the communications between lower positions and the higher-ups. Most of the time, such situations do not have because people have malicious intentions but because they are afraid of changes and what they might do to them. There are certain steps that you need to take to make sure that the leadership is on your side as far as ERP implementation is concerned. The first thing is that you should always be the first one to communicate any changes being made to the process followed in your company.
It is always not easy to do this. It becomes really hard to do this if you follow a routine of review cycles that occur every couple of weeks or a month. If you are good with written communication, you can try e-mailing people at these intervals. You can also communicate with them over the phone. It is important that you make your decisions seem justifiable from a business point of view. If you are unable to explain it to others, it means that your decision may not be sound enough.
It is also important to make the executives look at the big picture when you are making the presentations. This is why you need to make them aware of the possible results of some ERP strategies from a strategic point of view. This way you will be able to engage them in a positive and fruitful way. You should also look for feedback on your plans from the executives and while at the receiving end of the same, you should never be defensive. It is always important your goals with that of the executive leaders. In order to achieve this, you should be confident enough to listen to the problems they come up with and then respond to the same.
Such a way of work also makes sure that they are involved in the process of making decisions. It is always better that way as people then think the decisions to be a collective one rather than an individual one if only your ideas were behind it. If you can rally the executive leaders the middle management understands what a waste of time sensationalism can be. They will try and make a meaningful contribution to the efforts of ERP implementation. This will also be better for you.
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